A Swift Elusive Sword

7/23/2019 A Swift Elusive Sword

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A Swift,

Elusive Sword

chicheng

W H A T I F S U N T Z U A N D J O H N B O Y D

D I D A N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E R E V I E W ?

CHESTER W. RICHARDS

SECOND EDITION


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This study is a product of the Center for Defense Informations new Military Reform

Project. The projects goal is to regenerate vigorous debate over the uses, strategy,

doctrine, and forces of the U.S. military, and to address the deep institutionalproblems currently vexing the military. The project intends to serve as a home for

military reformers, and its products are being designed as tools for expression of a

wide range of analysis and views. Interested parties are invited to contact the project

fo r furthe r information: http://www.cdi.org/mrp/, Marcus Corbin,

[email protected], 202-797-5282.

A draft of this study was discussed at a seminar held at the Center for Defense

Information on March 28, 2001. The author and CDI would like to thank the

attendees for their invaluable contributions and input. The study represents

the views of the author alone, not of the attendees nor the Department of

Defense or other organizations the attendees are affiliated with. Participants

included General Pat Garvey, NYNM, Charles A. Leader, Franklin C. Spinney,

Major Don Vandergriff, U.S.A., Colonel Michael Wyly, U.S.M.C. (Ret.), and

Major Chris Yunker, U.S.M.C. (Ret.). Thanks also go to Gen. Charles Krulak,

U.S.M.C. (Ret.), former Commandant of the Marine Corps, for reviewing the

manuscript and providing helpful comments. Again, the views in the finalproduct are those of the author.

The author would like to thank Marcus Corbin for his encouragement and

especially for the flash of creativity that envisioned Sun Tzu and Boyd ever

doing a national defense review and that led to this study. Special thanks to

Theresa Hitchens, Senior Advisor at the Center for Defense Information, for

editing the study.

To encourage the intellectual freedom of the staff, the Center for Defense

Information does not hold organizational positions on public policy issues.

The views expressed in CDI publications are those of the author.

Center for Defense Information

1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20036-2109

2003 Center for Defense Information


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A Swift,Elusive Sword

WHAT IF SUN TZU AN D JOHN BOYD

DID A NATIONAL DEFENSE REVIEW?

CHESTER W. RICHARDS

Prepared for the Center for Defense Information

February 2003

SECOND EDITION


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About the Author

Chet Richards was an associate of the late Col. John Boyd

from 1973 until Boyds death in 1997. He reviewed all of

Boyds major works and worked closely with him on apply-

ing the concepts of maneuver warfare to business. Dr.

Richards has consulted in this area since the early 1990s

and operates a web site devoted to making Boyds strategies

accessible to businesses: http://www.belisarius.com. He

holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and recently retired as a colo-

nel in the Air Force Reserve, where he was the Air Attach

(Reserve) to Saudi Arabia.

Always moving, do not sit down, do not say I have

done enough. Keep on; see what else you can do

to raise the devil with the enemy.

Gen. George Patton1


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Table of Contents

Foreword ................................................................................................ 5

Executive Summary ................................................................................. 9Introduction ...........................................................................................13

Sun Tzu and John Boyd .......................................................................... 17

Sun Tzu ............................................................................................. 17

Sun Tzu 101 ..................................................................................18

Sun Tzu and Intelligence ...............................................................19

John Boyd .......................................................................................... 20

Boyd and Intelligence ....................................................................23

Role of Military Force ............................................................................ 25Threats to U.S. National Security ....................................................... 26

Sun Tzu and Boyd on the Utility of Military Force.............................27

Contemporary Justifications for Military Forces ................................. 29

Military vis--vis Other Options ........................................................ 32

Peacekeeping .....................................................................................35

What Makes a Military Force Effective? ............................................. 37

Sun Tzus and Boyds Perspective ....................................................... 37

Boyd on Force Effectiveness ............................................................... 39Cheng and Chi .................................................................................42

Other Concepts of Effectiveness ........................................................44

Creating Forces ......................................................................................49

Maneuver Warfare ............................................................................. 51

People Issues in Maneuver Warfare .................................................... 53

Cohesion .......................................................................................55

Training ........................................................................................56

Leadership ....................................................................................57The Officer Corps .........................................................................58

Equipment and Organizations for Maneuver Warfare.........................59

Force Structure Options ..................................................................... 61

Strike Forces .................................................................................. 64

Fire Support ..................................................................................65

Strategic and Mobility Forces ........................................................67

Assessing Effectiveness .................................................................. 67

Intelligence....................................................................................69Application: National Missile Defense (NMD) ..................................71

Conclusions ...........................................................................................75

Endnotes ................................................................................................77


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Foreword to the Second Edition

ASwift, Elusive Swordwas published in July 2001. At that time,

fourth generation warfare (4GW) was an esoteric concept prac-

ticed in distant countries by bearded religious fanatics. The de-

fense budget bobbed along just below its Cold War average, which seemed

adequate given that the mighty Soviet Union had collapsed a decade before.

And transformation was the talk of Washington, D.C., driven by a cageySecretary of Defense who had the dual advantage of previous experience in

the job and of running complex high-tech companies for a generation since

he last looked out from the E-ring of the Pentagon.

Since then, nothing of substance has changed, and so I have not changed

the text ofA Swift, Elusive Sword.

That a group of people willing to use whatever level of violence they thought

necessary was able to seize four civilian airliners and fly three of them into

buildings was riveting, but it did not lead to Islamic revolution in the Middle

East. Thugs have always been able to commit horrendous acts it is what

society does to punish them and prevent or deter others that is important. So

far the verdict is mixed.

We easily threw out the existing government of Afghanistan, but then so

did the Soviets in 1979, and it is too early to know if we will fare any better

after the novelty wears off. The Taliban were certainly accessories to the 9/11

crime, but it appears now that a large fraction of the perpetratorsal Qaeda escaped. Most of the al Qaeda we caught in Afghanistan were jihadi

wannabes who, like John Walker Lindh, ended up as conventional troops

fighting against the Northern Alliance. As of this writing, nobody knows


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6 | A Swift, Elusive Sword

where Osama bin Laden and his hardcore followers are. What is worse, al

Qaeda is not the oldest, may not be the best organized, and is probably noteven the most dangerous of the violent groups targeting the West. It is not

even clear if it is a real organization or some type of loose federation that

provides financing and networking to operationally dispersed cells. Eighteen

months after September 11, 2001, we just dont know.

With the sole exception of reinforcing cockpit doors, none of the changes

to our commercial air system would have bothered Mohammad Atta and his

associates in any way. They carried nothing illegal through airport security,

and they showed proper identification whenever asked. What did change,and it changed over western Pennsylvania that very morning, was that it will

be much more difficult to take control of an airplane from a passive group of

passengers and flight crew. But this has nothing to do with the defense issues

in this book, other than to illustrate the strange nature of fourth generation

warfare. The communists got one thing right when they described what we

call the fourth generation as peoples war.

If you have not already read the seminal paper on the subject by Bill Lind,

LtCol GI Wilson (USMCR), COL Keith Nightengale (USA), COL Joseph

W. Sutton (USA), and Capt John Schmitt (USMC), I urge you to do so now.

You can find it, along with a wealth of other material on 4GW at http://

www.d-n-i.net/second_level/fourth_generation_warfare.htm.

One thing did appear to change, although we might question how viable

it ever was: transformation is dead. Donald Rumsfeld fought the good fight;

for this we must give him credit. For the first time since Dick Cheney held

the office, a secretary of defense succeeded in shutting down a major ColdWar era program, in this case the lumbering Crusader artillery system, which

could charitably be described as a weapon for second generation warfare.

And there transformationstopped. The American political system is lubri-

cated by pork, and nobody trulybelieves there will ever be another war

against a formidable adversary, so providing effective defense remains sec-

ondary to ensuring reelection.

Looking back, transformation the way it was defined was not going to

solve our defense problems. Skipping a generation of weapons, had it oc-curred, would have starved the defense industries production base and in the

end swapped one brand of pork for another. True transformation doesnt fo-

cus on weapons, the least important factor in combat effectiveness, but puts


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Foreword | 7

emphasis on people and ideas. This is well understood by those who have to

do the fighting. Adding to the growing literature on the people factor, ArmyMAJ Don Vandergriff published the latest in his series on personnel man-

agement, The Path to Victory, in May 2002 (Presidio).

Are we closer to the quick striking force envisioned in A Swift, Elusive

Sword? You might think so, just looking at the hardware: The Army wants to

field Stryker wheeled fighting vehicles that would be much lighter than tanks,

and the Marines have programs underway to develop even more advanced

light armor. But the hardware wish list tells very little. We could conduct

operations as described in this book very well with the hardware we havetoday. Our failure is a lack of ideas and enough people with the vision to

execute them.

As I am writing this, we are completing a months-long buildup of another

massive conventional army, said to eventually number 150,000 troops, for a

second round at the only person on the planet dumb enough to sit and watch

us do it, again. By the time you read this, you will know if we attacked and

how well our forces did. The question of whether such a strategy of tele-

graphing our intentions months in advance would work against anybody else

is still open. One suspects it would not impress John Boyd or Sun Tzu.

Finally, we seem to have lost ground in the arena of grand strategy, that is,

of ensuring the support of our allies and attracting the uncommitted to our

side, while building up our own internal cohesion and most important, isolat-

ing our adversaries. An effective grand strategy is essential for carrying out

the rapier-like operations advocated in this book. As of mid-February 2003,

we are receiving unqualified support largely from newly-minted allies in coun-tries most Americans could not locate on a map, and whose devotion is, one

suspects, driven by as much by our money and hope of future assistance as by

the rightness of our cause.

Perhaps the only real change since mid-2001 is that John Boyd, the late

Air Force colonel whose ideas form the strategic framework for this book, is

finally beginning to receive some of the credit he deserved in life. At about

the same time this book appeared, Prof. Grant Hammond, chair of Strategy

and Technology at the Air War College, published The Mind of War(Smithsonian Institution, May 2001), a quite readable summary of Boyds

career and exegesis of his ideas. One year later, Keith Hammonds wrote a

long piece on Boyd for managers and entrepreneurs entitled, logically, Strat-


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egy of the Fighter Pilot, (Fast Company, June 2002). Capping this spate of

posthumous recognition, novelist and journalist Robert Coram published amagnificent biography of Boyds entire life, Boyd: the Fighter Pilot Who

Changed the Art of War, in November 2002 (Little, Brown). The two web

sites that promote Boyds strategy, www.belisarius.com and www.d-n-i.net,

draw roughly one million visitors per year.

Nothing that has happened in the last two years, however, changes the

primary conclusion of the book: that our defense strategy is unsustainable

fiscally and increasingly less effective militarily. Since the inauguration of the

new administration, we have swung from paying down the national debt toadding to it in amounts not seen since the Reagan era. Much of this still goes

to buy weapons designed to defeat the Soviet Union and to provide forces that

seem to move in slow motion. In the meantime, more baby boomers (includ-

ing this one) are approaching retirement, and the non-military components

of national power health, education, diplomacy, the strength of our

economy, the checks and balances that preserve our liberties, and respect for

and enforcement of the law continue to erode.

Chet Richards

Atlanta, Georgia

February 2003


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Executive Summary

What kind of question is: What if Sun Tzu and John Boyd did

a National Defense Review? Sun Tzu, if he existed at all, has

been gone some 2,500 years. The late Col. John R. Boyd,

U.S.A.F., while intimately involved in fighter aircraft design during his active

duty years, wrote practically nothing on hardware or force structure after he

retired, when he created the strategic concepts for which he is best known

today.

Yet these two strategists offer a solution to the dilemma now confronting the

U.S. military: U.S. spending on defense exceeds by several times that of any

combination of threats, but the services still face cancellation of weapon sys-

tems and shortages of money for training, spares, and care and feeding of the

troops. The only solution offered by political leaders is to spend even more.

Sun Tzu and John Boyd offer a way out because they considered the prob-

lem of conflict in a wider scope. They explored the essential, but limited, roleof military force in resolving conflict, and they examined in some detail the

issue of What makes a force effective? The answers they derived are largely

independent of the particular age in which one dwells and the specific weap-

ons one uses.

Sun Tzu (c. 500 B.C.) emphasized harmony on the inside in order to create

and exploit chaos outside. If done well, such a strategy eliminated, or at worst

greatly reduced, the need for bloody battles. Employing time as his primary

weapon, Sun Tzu strove to create ambiguity in the minds of enemy com-manders as the milieu for weaving his web of surprise, deception, and rapid

switching between orthodox and unorthodox tactics. The ideal result is to

win without fighting.


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Similarly, Boyd (1927-1997) used his well-known observe-orient-decide-

act pattern to operate inside his opponents decision cycles generating firstconfusion, then frustration, and finally panic in the enemy ranks. Once thus

set up, the enemy could be finished off with a bewildering array of distract-

ing and probing attacks, leading to multiple thrusts aimed at destroying his

cohesion and collapsing his will to resist. A primary measure of merit was

prisoner not body count. To allow forces to sustain such high operational

tempos, Boyd codified an organizational climate derived from such diverse

sources as Sun Tzu, the German blitzkrieg, and the early Israeli Army.

Recently, officers primarily in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have com-pleted detailed recommendations on how to change personnel management

systems to foster Boyds organizational climate. Boyds formula of people

ideashardware, in that order, holds as well for warring states on the plains

of ancient China as for guerilla warfare or national missile defense today.

This paper attempts to make four fundamental points:

1. What is important isforces combinations of people, ideas, and hard-

ware not individual weapons programs.2. The strategic framework expounded by Sun Tzu and John Boyd pro-

vides a coherent and historically validated method for comparing one

force with another.

3. Neither Sun Tzu nor Boyd gave explicit guidance on selecting hard-

ware. One can, however, construct hypothetical forces including a hard-

ware component and, using their framework, compare them to current

and planned U.S. forces.

4. To illustrate this process, this paper posits one such force and claimsthat not only would it be more effective than what the United States has

today, but that it would require significantly fewer resources (although

that is not its primary purpose).

This synthesis relies heavily on the style of fighting Boyd espoused, which

he derived largely from Sun Tzu and from commanders, including Ameri-

cans such as Grant and Patton, who employed this style with remarkable

success down through history.2

One can use the precepts of what is now calledmaneuver warfare to help choose between alternative force structures, but

not, as it turns out, between individual weapons.


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The force, outlined in broad terms, may strike some as radically improb-

able, and as one which could never be adopted by the U.S. defense establish-ment. This could well be true, but is more a statement about the stability of

the current military-industrial-congressional complex than the efficacy (or

lack thereof) of these proposals. It is also irrelevant. The United States is not

going to adopt this force. But it does illustrate what the forces could evolve

into, if the United States adopted the eminently feasible measures regarding

people and ideas.

Briefly, this paper suggests deactivating from the U.S. Army that part of it

which is unlikely to reach a theater of conflict while any modern war is stillgoing on. The Marine Corps and those units of the Army generally called

unconventional would remain. Properly supported, this provides a mobile

striking force that could rapidly descend on any part of the globe, should that

prove desirable, and strike directly at the heart of an enemy nation. It could

have won the Gulf War several months sooner than the ponderous forma-

tions eventually deployed. This study does assume, as did Boyd and Sun Tzu,

that for all but the briefest operations, the United States will fight in conjunc-

tion with allies.

However, readers should not focus so narrowly on the hardware illustra-

tions that they ignore the people issues that are the bulk of this paper, as they

are of Boyd and Sun Tzu. These address the core of force effectiveness why

people fight, why they polish their fighting skills, why they refuse to quit

until they have won. The recommendations in this section draw heavily on

recent studies carried out by current and former members of the U.S. Army.

Ironically, implementing just these suggestions would improve our defenseposture far more than tinkering with weapons programs, and would save con-

siderable money at the same time.

Finally, and as an application of these principles, I examine the problem

of how to deal with the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction of all

types, of which national missile defense represents only one component,

and perhaps the least likely, but the one most attuned to our current military-

industrial-congressional situation.


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Introduction

One might have thought that with the collapse of the only country

that could threaten the U.S. military, American leaders would have

ordered the Pentagon to radically reconfigure the forces, reduced

the corresponding budgets, and put those resources to more productive uses

elsewhere in the economy or returned them to the taxpayers. Spending did

indeed drop, but only from the Reagan peak back to the Cold War norm. (See

Figure 1.) With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, this is now roughly

three times what any conceivable combination of threat countries is spend-

ing, but many in both major U.S. political parties insist it is not enough. (See

Figure 2.) Congress is competing with itself to raise the defense budget, re-

cently voting to add $8.7 billion on top of the approximately $14 billion the

new administration already added to the outgoing Clinton submission. Mem-

bers are warning that hundreds of billions more may be needed to fund re-

serve modernization, national missile defense, and unforeseen contingencies.

3

Something is badly wrong.

Partly that something is straightforward politics. Even when the using ser-

vice and the secretary of defense have expressed a need for the weapon, it

represents votes from the employees who work on the program, and from

other constituents who believe that these programs are good for the district or

who simply see defense contracts as elements of civic pride. Absent of such a

need, defense programs are jobs programs without the welfare label.4

But more seriously for national security, elevated defense spending alsorepresents evidence of a failed paradigm, that capability and hence secu-

rity are functions of how much money is pumped into them. If the United

States spends more, it must be getting more. The fact that this paradigm has


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failed is evident from the numbers: If three times the threat isnt enough,

what is? Actually, it is worse than that. By focusing the debate on spending,

the United States is not thinking clearly about what really makes an effective

military force. After all, France greatly outspent Germany during the inter-

war years, especially on designing and building the Maginot Line, but lost inthree decisive weeks in the Spring of 1940. And it is impossible to even guess

by how much the United States outspent Vietnam. One should not be too

quick to rule out cause-and-effect in these cases.5

Increasing U.S. defense spending at this point is very much like giving

more food to a very obese, but very hungry and insistent, relative. It may

quiet him down for a few minutes, but somehow you know it isnt the solu-

tion to his problem.

To begin to answer the question of What could be done to improve theDefense Department (DoD) and its forces? one must first ask, What makes

one force more effective than another? Which immediately leads to the ques-

tion of Effective at what? What role should military forces play in furthering

Vietnam Clinton500

300

400

200

100

0

Reagan-Bush

1950 19901970 19801960 2000

FY2002 est.

FIGURE 1:

U.S. Defense SpendingCONSTANT 2001 DOLLARS

Source: F.C. Spinney, http://www.d-n-i.net


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Sun Tzu and John Boyd

What changes would Sun Tzu or John Boyd make to U.S. forces,

and to DoD in general, if they were conducting a National

Defense Review? Sun Tzu, by way of explanation, wrote the

earliest extant treatise on military strategy, dating from around the 5th Cen-

tury B.C.7The late U.S.A.F. Col. John R. Boyd (1927-1997) drew heavily on

Sun Tzus works in his examination of strategy, Patterns of Conflict, which

he compiled in the late 1970s to mid-1980s. A synopsis of their ideas, as

might apply to a major defense review today, appears in the next sections.

This paper will work backwards, starting with the role of armed forces in

national defense, then examining what Sun Tzu and Boyd had to say about

what made forces effective in fulfilling those roles, and finally ending with

some specific suggestions for creating more effective forces.

Sun TzuAlthough there appears to be broad agreement that some one individual, prob-

ably a high level commander, wrote the bulk of what is now known as The Art

of War, there is less agreement on when he lived and serious disagreement over

how to translate much of the text into modern English.8The consensus is that

a certain Sun Wu (the Tzu is an honorific, usually translated as Master)

lived in what is now eastern China just before the Warring States period (and

perhaps overlapping its early years), which lasted from 453 to 211 B.C. Inter-

ested readers are referred to any of the introductions to modern translations forfurther speculation on the historical figure of Sun Wu.

Salient points for the current discussion, which are generally agreed by the

major interpreters, include:


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1. The text presents a coherent theory of armed conflict, suggesting that

it is largely the work of a single individual.2. The Thirteen Chapters of The Art of War have survived basically

unaltered since at least 100 B.C., the approximate date of the Linyi

Text.9

3. The Art of Warwas rapidly accepted as military doctrine in China,

reflecting both its efficacy on the battlefield and its harmony with the

dominant Taoist philosophy of the era.

4. The Art of Warhas entered the Taoist canon, with standard collections of

commentaries dating from before 200 A.D., and has been influential aboveall other military texts in those regions where Taoism or the related philo-

sophical system of Zen predominate, most especially in Japan.10

Sun Tzu 101

The time in which Sun Tzu most probably lived, like those that spawned

many other great strategic works, was a wonderful laboratory for the creation,

testing, and evolution of military ideas. During the aptly named Warring

States period, China broke into some eight major states and a dozen or so

principalities, each of which was attempting to subdue the others by armed

conflict. Invasion by one or more neighbors posed a constant threat, so that

war truly was, in the famous opening words of the book, the path of survival

and destruction.11

The strategy devised by Sun Tzu fit the circumstances perfectly. Consid-

ered broadly, it rested on two major and complementary elements, one inter-

nal and one external. Harmony on the inside is The Way(Tao)

of war.

12

Allelse flows from this basic idea, and without it, there is little reason to press

forward into the stress of military operations. Externally, Suns goal was to

create confusion in the opposing side and then exploit it. The focus was not

on winning through superior tactics or individual fighting technique (although

these are important), but, as Griffith notes, the enemy commanders must

become confused and if possible, driven insane. His primary tool for accom-

plishing this was quickness, which helps create ambiguity and also increases

the effectiveness of a panoply of tools, such as deception, security, and intel-ligence, that will be addressed in the following sections.13

This strategy differs fundamentally from the core of Western military

doctrine, which follows the strategy of Carl von Clausewitz.14Clausewitzs


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Sun Tzu and John Boyd | 19

primary goal was to bring the opposing army to decisive battle, and then

win it. Sun Tzu wanted to achieve victory in war, but preferably by causingthe enemy army to disintegrate before the battle:

Therefore, those who win every battle are not really skillful those who

render others armies helpless without fighting are the best of all.15

Although this may not always be possible, it sets a completely different

focus on how one approaches the conduct of conflict. As Boyd noted,

Clausewitz, even if his strategy is successful, invariably leads to bloody battles

of attrition.16

Sun Tzu and Intelligence

The final chapter of The Art of War deals with use of spies.

So what enables an intelligent government and wise military leader-

ship to overcome others and achieve extraordinary accomplishment is

foreknowledge. Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spir-

its, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It

must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the

enemy.17

Far from a throw-away chapter stuck at the end of the book, the section on

spies is actually the culmination of the entire work. Sun Tzu makes this clear

in the final passage:

So only a brilliant ruler or a wise general who can use the highly

intelligent for espionage is sure of great success. This is essential formilitary operations, and the armies depend on this for their actions.18

Sun Tzus commanders are not passive consumers of intelligence. A

general in the Sun Tzu tradition takes as much personal interest in employing

spies as he does in issuing orders to his subordinate commanders. He is as

active in intelligence as he is in operations:

Of all those in the army close to the commander, none is as intimate

as the secret agent; of all rewards, none more liberal than those givento secret agents.19


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To be parsimonious with positions, compensations, or hundreds of

pounds of gold, and thereby blind to the enemys status, is to be ex-traordinarily inhumane: such a man can never be considered his

peoples commander, can never be his lords aide, and can never be the

ruler of victory.20

A commander whose primary contact with intelligence is the daily coordi-

nated, scripted, and rehearsed intelligence briefing could never be success-

ful in the Sun Tzu school.

John Boyd

The Sun Tzu School of strategy continues as an unbroken thread from the

Warring States period to the present day. Just the standard collections of com-

mentaries span a period of close to 1,700 years. Sun Tzu is widely studied

today in Japan, where one of its most influential strategy texts, Miyamoto

Musashis Book of Five Rings(1645 A.D.) is a direct adaptation of the ideas

of The Art of Warto the military situation of the time.21

More recently, Mao Tse Tung was a careful student of Sun Tzu and gavehim full credit for the strategy which allowed his rag tag army to eventually

defeat the Nationalists and their Western supporters.22In a very real sense,

Boyd represents the most recent major member of this school.23Of all the

strategists he considered, and the list includes such luminaries as Clausewitz,

Jomini, Bonaparte, Saxe, and most of the other classroom standards, Sun Tzu

was the only one that Boyd did not critique in his major work,A Discourse on

Winning and Losing.24

Boyd is best known for two achievements. He was the first to derive amathematically coherent theory of air combat, energy maneuverability,

which for two competing fighters shows precisely which will have the advan-

tage in any flight state (combination of airspeed, altitude, and direction).

Maneuverability is the ability to change flight states to climb, for ex-

ample, turn, or accelerate or any combination thereof. Directly because of

Boyds efforts, fighter design swung away from aircraft optimized to fly at

very high speed in a straight line, such as the YF-12, towards the highly ma-

neuverable aircraft we see today, particularly the F-15 and F-16 in the Air

Force and the F-18 variants in the Navy and Marine Corps.25


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But perhaps uniquely among major strategists, Boyd found and acknowl-

edged a fundamental shortcoming in his theory and his correction proved tobe much more powerful than this original idea (and far more applicable to

other forms of conflict, such as business). Basically, there were times when

the less maneuverable aircraft won. It is true that for this to happen, both

aircraft had to be roughly comparable that is, the original theory still held in

most cases but there were instances, such as the F-86 vs. the MiG-15 and

the YF-16 vs. the YF-17, where energy maneuverability alone did not ad-

equately explain the results. These anomalies led Boyd to the idea of fast

transients, that is, the ability to transition between maneuver states. He calledthis ability, agility. To give an example: at a given airspeed and altitude, the

more maneuverable fighter could make a tighter turn, while the more agile

could more quickly change from a (perhaps not quite so tight) turn in one

direction to a (perhaps not quite so tight) turn in another:

The ability to shift from one maneuver to another more rapidly than

an adversary enables one to win in air-to-air combat.26

Boyd also made a critical observation, that the pilots of the more maneu-verable but less agile fighters often became frustrated while trying to pin down

their more agile adversaries, and this sometimes caused them to make mis-

takes. The pilots of the more agile aircraft could often spot and exploit these

mistakes to win a victory. Boyd was a student of military history and this rang

a bell. This idea of discombobulating the enemy first and then and only

then engaging in close combat was fundamental to several earlier strate-

gists, most notably Sun Tzu.

At this point Boyd made his best-known contribution to modern strategy,

expanding the concept of agility from a largely physical property of air-

craft to a largely mental property of competitive organisms in general. He

concluded that it is as if the more agile competitor is able to observe, orient,

decide, and act more quickly than the other. If he can consistently go through

this loop more inconspicuously, more quickly, and with more irregularity,

which Boyd equated to operating inside the opponents OODA loops, he

will disorient and confuse his opponent precisely as Sun Tzu had mandated.27

This leap from air-to-air combat to the now famous Observe-Orient-De-

cide-Act (OODA) loop (Figure 3) and its link to the strategic purpose of Sun

Tzu is perhaps the most brilliant insight of strategy in the last 100 years.


24/92


O

bserva

tio

ns

OBSERVE

Unfolding

Circumstances

Outside

Information

FEED

FORWARD

Implicit

Guidance

&Control

Implicit

Guidance

&Control

Implicit

Guidanc e

&C

ontrol

Cultural

Traditions

Genetic

Heritage

Previous

Experience

New

Information

Analyses&

Synthesis

FEED

FORWARD

Dec

ision

(Hypo

th

es

is)

Ac

tio

n

(Tes

t)

FEED

FORWARD

FEEDBACK

FEEDBACK

Unfolding

Inte

raction

W

ith

Environment

Unfo

lding

Interaction

With

Enviro

nment

ORIENT

DECIDE

ACT

Notehoworientationshapesobservation,shapes

decision,shapesaction,andinturnisshaped

bythefeedackandotherphenomenacominginto

oursensingorobservingwindow.

Alsonotehowtheentire

loop

(notjustorientation)isanongoingmany-sidedimplicitcross-

referencingproc

essofprojection,empathy,correlation,andrejection.

John

R.Boyd,1992

FIGURE3

:

TheOODA

Loop

SKETCH


25/92


Over the course of about 10 years, Boyd evolved an 8-hour briefing, Pat-

terns of Conflict,that led viewers to this conclusion. Beginning with SunTzu, continuing through the Battles of Marathon and Leuctra (Epaminondas

classic victory over the then-invincible Spartans in 371 B.C.), visiting

Alexanders conquests, then winding its way finally to the blitzkrieg (particu-

larly against France in 1940) and modern guerilla warfare, Boyd showed that

his pattern held, time after time. More agile armies had defeated their larger

and technologically advanced opponents with remarkable frequency, and this

pattern continues to the present day, most obviously in the Arab-Israeli Wars

from 1947 to 1973 and the Vietnam War.

Boyd and Intelligence

At first glance, Boyd appears to accord intelligence a much lower status than

did Sun Tzu. He has no briefing with intelligence(or anything roughly

synonymous) in the title, nor is the word in the title of even one of his brief-

ing slides. When it does appear, it is generally in a list with many other items.

For example, in Blitzkrieg: Keys to Success,the third point is:

Intelligence, reconnaissance (air and ground) and stratagem empha-

sized before and during combat operations to unmask and shape pat-

terns of adversary strengths, weaknesses, moves, and intentions.28

It does not appear at all in any of his major summary charts, such as the

Essencesof maneuver and moral conflict or the Pattern for Successful

Operations.

Even a cursory glance at Boyds OODA Loop Sketch, however, shows that

Boyd regarded intelligence in the broadest sense no less highly than Sun Tzu.

Boyd constantly emphasizes the importance of open systems, and the only

opening into the OODA loop is through Observation. If one fails by what-

ever means to spot mismatches between what one believes to be going on and

what really is, (i.e., between Orientation and the real world), one has become

mentally isolated.29If an adversary can keep us in this stateperhaps by

operating inside our OODA loopsthen as setback after inexplicable frus-

tration befall us, we will become disoriented, confused, indecisive, fearful,etc., and a competent enemy will be able to create, locate, and exploit vulner-

abilities leading, in the case of maneuver warfare, to frequent envelopments,

ambushes, high prisoner counts or, as Boyd put it, any other phenomenon


26/92


that suggests inability to adapt to change.30This explains, by the way, why

ill-treatment of POWs cannot be tolerated: A battlefield commander shouldwantthem to surrender, and needs to make it as easy as possible.

Interested readers can download Boyds major briefings at Defense and

the National Interest, http://www.d-n-i.net.


27/92

Role of Military Force

Although Sun Tzu is best known for his admonition that To win

without fighting is best,the subject of this sentence and of The

Art of Waris To win.Whether used to fight or for some other

purpose, Sun Tzu placed a high premium on the utility of military force. The

opening of The Art of Warsimply states that:

Military action is important to the nation it is the ground of deathand life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is imperative to

examine it.

Sun Tzu does not directly address the place of military activities in ad-

vancing the larger national interest, perhaps because the answer was obvious

in an era known as the Warring States.The actual name of the book in

Chinese suggests this focus: Sunzi bingfa,or Sun Tzus Principles for Using

Forces.31However, Sun Tzus book is firmly in the Taoist tradition on the use

of violence. The fundamental text of classical Taoism, the Tao Te Ching(c.

500 B.C.), states that, Weapons are the tools of fear. A decent man will

avoid them, except in the direst necessity.32

Some may argue that we have now swung to the opposite extreme. Is the

entire study of war obsolete? The age we are in is hardly the first in which

many people seriously believe that large-scale war lies entirely in the past. As

late as 1913, educated commentators were proclaiming war in Europe impos-

sible because either the bankers would not finance it or the workers of theworld would refuse to take up arms against their brethren. While this paper

will accept that the survival of the United States is not jeopardized by a replay

of World War II, legitimate security concerns remain.


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Threats to U.S. National Security

First, there are still thousands of nuclear warheads in the Former Soviet Union(FSU), and some number of these are mounted on delivery systems still ca-

pable of propelling them onto U.S. soil. However, the U.S. strategic position

relative to the states of the Former Soviet Union is much better than it was to

the real Soviet Union, and since it is not clear that an exchangeof nuclear

weapons constitutes war, the goal of which is survivalon the nations own

terms, this paper will not address major changes to U.S. strategic posture.

The only other direct military threat to the United States proper could

come from the emerging nuclear states, including China, India, Pakistan, Is-rael, and potentially Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. This paper will consider

what Sun Tzu and Boyd might have done about this threat.

There are also still circumstances that, although not directly threatening United

States territory, could call forth a significant military response. Most likely, per-

haps, would be another large-scale attack against a country that the U.S. considers

a vital national interest.As will be noted in the next section, both Sun Tzu and

Boyd urge caution, since there are potentially an unlimited number of these and

in most cases military force is only one tool at our disposal.

U.S. forces may also become engaged to protect areas considered invio-

lable by politically influential blocs, Israel and Taiwan come immediately to

mind, and as population demographics change, others may be added. In the

latter two cases, U.S. forces could face anything from a large-scale conven-

tional attack a replay of Desert Storm to what is being called fourth

generation warfare(4GW). This term basically describes any way of deal-

ing with U.S. military forces other than confronting them on the battlefield.

33

It includes all forms of terrorism, guerilla warfare, intifada-type urban unrest

sometimes financed by relationships with criminal or narcotics networks

and others that will evolve.

As Dr. Grant Hammond of the Air War College notes, 4GW is not just

guerilla warfare under another name:

Perceiving war as a contest marked by the use of force is a woefully

incomplete, tragically simplistic, and fundamentally flawed view

a future war among industrialized states, even if effective and effi-

cient, could be virtually invisible.34


29/92

Role of Military Force | 27

The threat of major conventional war or even more remotely that the

leadership of some roguestate will commit suicide by attempting to lobtheir one working nuclear device in our directionis insignificant compared

to the certainty of 4GW. As General Charles Krulak, a former Commandant

of the Marine Corps, has noted, We need to watch for the Stepchild of

Chechnyavice the Son of Desert Storm.35

In true 4GW, distinctions between civilians and combatants blur, so an

enemy might seek to counter an F-22 by poisoning the squadrons mess hall,

blowing up its barracks (as in Beirut), or even attacking schools and PXs back

at the base. Fourth generation warfare, while indeed highly asymmetric,isnot the same as asymmetric warfare,since maneuver warfare is also asym-

metricand calls for creating and exploiting enemy weaknesses, rather than

engaging and trying to reduce his formations and fortified positions directly.

This is not meant to be a complete list of the possibilities for using U.S.

military forces, but should illustrate that since the resort to armed conflict is

still the ultimate arbitrator of disputes, the United States will have no short-

age of opportunity to participate. Indeed, as of Jan. 1, 2001, the Center for

Defense Information lists nearly 40 major active conflictsaround the world,

any one of which could be the spark for commitment of U.S. military forces.36

Survival of the United States does not have to be the issue; survival of the

current political leadership will suffice.

Sun Tzu and Boyd on the Utility of Military Force

Sun Tzu recommends two options as superior to battle for using military

force to triumph in war. The best way to defeat an enemy is by attacking hisstrategy.The commentators differ on what this means. One school insists

that it simply means to attack early, while the enemys plans are being laid.37

Others find a deeper meaning, to employ unusual methods to seize victory

without even battling,which seems more in harmony with the maxim that

to win without fighting is best.38

Should this prove impossible, Sun Tzu then recommends disrupting his

alliances. Again, the commentators fail to agree, with some saying that it means

to attack early, before the enemy can solidify his alliances. Others suggest itmeans isolating potential enemies from sources of support, or intimidating

them through strong alliances of your own. Again, this latter interpretation

seems more in line with the rest of the book.


30/92


Boyd takes a similar, but broader approach. He begins Patterns of Con-

flictwith an observation on human nature, that we strive to:Survive, survive on own terms, or improve our capacity for indepen-

dent action.

The competition for limited resources to satisfy these desires may force

one to:

Diminish adversarys capacity for independent action, or deny him

the opportunity to survive on his own terms, or make it impossible for

him to survive at all.39

It is important to notice that Boyd uses mayrather than will,leaving

open the possibility of resolving the competition for resources without forc-

ing these alternatives on ones adversaries, or making them adversaries at all.

Even if diminishing, denying, or eliminating an adversary should become

necessary, he does not mandate war and certainly not armed conflict as the

only method. However, he leaves the possibility open, as well as the possibil-

ity that resort to arms is what the adversary will choose.In fact, Boyd is insistent that the use of armed force must be carefully

thought out so that it does not cause more problems than it solves. For this, he

expands on Sun Tzus first two courses of actions through his concept of

grand strategy,which serves to:

1. Support national goals.

2. Pump up ones own resolve, drain away the adversarys resolve, and

attract the uncommitted to ones cause.3. End the conflict on favorable terms.

4. Ensure that the conflict and peace terms do not provide the seeds for

(unfavorable) future conflict.40

He then summarizes his argument to this point in a hierarchy, starting

with the primary national goal (Improve our fitness, as an organic whole, to

shape and cope with an ever-changing environment), and working down

through various levels of strategy to tactics. Careful examination of this hier-

archy shows that the phrases military force,armed conflict,or even war

are not mentioned at all.41The resort to such methods is just one tool for

accomplishing Boyds grand scheme, and the strategy and tactics of Pat-


31/92


terns of Conflictdo provide a guide for using themwhen necessaryin

harmony with the grand strategy outlined above.In summary, neither Boyd nor Sun Tzu saw war as the solution to all of

humanitys problems, or even that armed conflict was the best way to prosecute

war once it had become necessary. Both would agree that the goal of war, once

it is unleashed, is more than just to achieve victory, but to accomplish it:

In the shortest possible time.

At the least possible cost in lives and effort to ones own side.

With the infliction on the enemy of the fewest possible casualties.42

Contemporary Justifications for Military Forces

Today, one finds many justifications for U.S. military force, all of which can

be included within three broad categories:

1. Defend the homeland from attack.

2. Enforce a Pax Americana.

3. Protect vital U.S. interests abroad.

Most Americans would agree on the legitimacy of defending U.S. territory

from attack, although there is an argument over defense against whatdoes

the United States need a national missile defense, for exampleand against

whom (just foreign militaries, or should narcotics traffickers, or illegal aliens

be included)? The debate becomes truly heated when other uses of military

force enter the equation.

Pax Americana,for example, refers to the idea that as the sole remaining

superpower, it is in the best long-term U.S. interest to intervene militarily toensure peace and stability anywhere around the world, that it is better to stamp

out brushfires than fight major conflagrations.43A recent RAND study con-

cluded that We learned [in the last decade] that American economic and

military strength is as important as ever and that much of the world still

depends upon us to be engaged and to lead.44A former secretary of the

Navy insists that since the end of the Cold War, the United States has be-

come the linchpin of securityin Europe and Asia.45

Most Americans would agree with the goal of creating a safer, more peace-

ful world. The real issue is whether such an objective should guide the sizing

and organization of U.S. military forces. On the surface, this seems to have

support from Sun Tzu, since he noted that, the superior militarist strikes


32/92


while the schemes are still being laid.46However this observation is really

advice on how to conduct operations once the decision to do so has been made.It does not address the larger question of the role of military operations in

national policy. The Tao Te Ching,however, takes the problem on directly:

If a nation is centered in the Tao

if it nourishes its own people

and doesnt meddle in the affairs of others

it will be a light to all the nations of the world.47

It is probably redundant to note that this advice was widely ignored dur-ing the ensuing Warring States period. And the U.S. governments ignoring

of it in Vietnam produced entirely predictable effects, which are a hallmark

of fourth generation warfare:

Both the French and the Americans, not to mention the Saigon regime

itself, resorted to force because of the unassailable supremacy of the

Communists in the political arena. All three learned (or should have

learned) that force by itself was inappropriate, because the applica-

tion of force made the political appeal of the insurgency all the greater.

The harder they tried to win the war, the more disruption they caused,

and the more remote victory became.48

The other problem with enforcing worldwide peace is that it is a large job.

Many of the 40 major armed conflicts active in the world involve longstanding

ethnic or tribal disputes.49It is not clear how entry of U.S. armed forces would

resolve them. This suggests a policy of selective intervention, which is usually

phrased as protecting U.S. vital interests.The current U.S. administration

ran on a platform that would embrace such a policy, and even suggested it would

rethink the U.S. role in the Balkans since it saw no vital interestsin that area.

As with the Pax Americana, most Americans would probably agree with

the idea that the United States should employ its armed forces to protect vital

interests. However, in a sense this is a tautology since vital interestsare

precisely those that would justify armed military intervention. For sure, U.S.

leaders will commit enormous forces to protect such things as access to crudeoil, and given the dependence of the U.S. economy on imported resources,

practically any part of the world could become a vital national interestin

the future.50


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To make protection of vital interestsuseful for creating forces, however,

the United States would have to determine in advance what its specific vitalinterests are. There are at least two major problems one runs into when at-

tempting to put this idea into practice. First, vital interests change and

often faster than weapons or forces can. Who, as late as 1994, would have

thought that Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo would have represented vital

American interests? Because development cycles for major weapons often

exceed one human generation, the United States will protect its vital interests

with the forces it has, or even select these interests based in part on what the

forces can do.51

The other problem inherent in the vital interests approach to force cre-

ation is the range and sheer number of potential areas and scenarios that could

involve vital interests.During the Cold War this was not a severe problem,

since for 45 years the Soviet Union and its allies provided a clear focus for

determining national interests. Today, the range extends from incidents, such

as rescue of U.S. citizens, to assisting allies (especially those with sizable vot-

ing diasporas in the United States) in everything from terrorism and guerilla

warfare to repelling a conventional attack to a major theater waragainst

some as yet undetermined, but large and capable, conventional opponent. It

follows that potential theaters of operations could range from desert to jungle

to teeming Third World metropolis.

If one were to make an explicit list of vital areas, however, doesnt this

suggest a carte blanchefor others elsewhere? Many historians argue that the

Korean and Gulf Wars began precisely because the United States had indi-

cated that South Korea and Kuwait lay outside its vital areas. Even if the U.S.government doesnt publicize its list (and for once, secrets remain secret), any

adversary worthy of the term can look at the forces the U.S. military has,

along with basing and treaty structure, and infer what the United States con-

siders vital.

In summary, it would seem that using protection of vital national inter-

estsas the primary rationale for sizing U.S. military forces quickly and logi-

cally transforms into the Pax Americana. The only ways out would be for

U.S. leaders to convince themselves that they can indeed predict the future, orto announce in advance that the United States is writing off the non-vital

areas of the world. One of the purposes of this paper will be to offer an

alternative that does not suffer from these defects.


34/92


Military vis--vis Other Options

After the events of the 20th Century, few would argue that the world hasentered an Aquarian Age of peace, love, and universal respect for human

rights. And the world is not short of people who might view the United States

as an impediment to surviving on their own terms or those of their nation,

ideology, or religion. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has noted,

History shows that weakness is provocative,and there is nothing in either

Sun Tzu or Boyd to contradict this assessment.

The real issue is: What should be the role of the military in protecting U.S.

interests, in conjunction with other tools for advancing national goals? Someargue that the end of the Cold War made the world more unpredictable, and so

the United States must now increase reliance on the military to protect its na-

tional interests. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, for example,

has called for a 20 percent increase in the defense budget, noting that, Recent

events in the Middle East should underscore that we are living in unpredictable

and even dangerous times. A strong military is a bulwark against threats to U.S.

vital interests and to our homeland.52Columnist Charles Krauthammer sim-

ply tells the rest of the world to bend to the U.S. will, or else.53

Other commentators, such as Daniel Gourof the Lexington Institute,

suggest that the United States already relies too heavily on the military as-

pects of securing national interests:

The experiences in the Balkans, Chechnya, East Timor and elsewhere

have shown the limited capacity of the major powers to deploy forces

relevant to keeping the peace and rebuilding states shattered by civil war.

Civil affairs capabilities have proven to be almost non-existent. Keep-

ing the peace requires soldiers to act like policemen, a job for which

they are ill-prepared and ill-equipped. Yet, an effort to create an in-

ternational police force for Bosnia and Kosovo has stalled. The scar-

city of engineering units has also restricted efforts to rebuild civil in-

frastructure.

The Wests decidedly mixed record in managing these new crises nev-

ertheless shows well in comparison to that of other developed coun-

tries such as Israel and Russia. Israel, possessing the worlds premier

conscript-based army, still finds its vaunted military superiority of

little use in the face of sophisticated unconventional threats.54


35/92


Even a cursory glance at world opinion suggests that Gouris correct. It

should not be too surprising that many Third World countries resent the U.S.ready resort to military power:

Clearly, the U.S. is rushing to court unpopularity across the world,

contrary to expectations that the Bush national security establishment

would conduct itself with a degree of sophistication. There is little

sign of the maturity, balance and sobriety expected of the reluctant

warrior Colin Powell The U.S. policy in the first month of Presi-

dent George Bush is suggestive at once of a lack of coherence and

hegemonic arrogance. Only time will tell whether this is disorienta-

tion caused by the GOPs eight years out of office or this is the U.S. as

the new cowboy on the rampage. The Bush administration has possi-

bly set a record for alienating so many nations in such a short period.55

And perhaps U.S. policy-makers can shrug off the warnings of former

Soviets, like Mikhail Gorbachev:

I would go even further and say it is time for Americas electorate to

be told the blunt truth: that the present situation of the United States,

with a part of its population able to enjoy a life of extraordinary

comfort and privilege, is not tenable as long as an enormous portion

of the world lives in abject poverty, degradation and backwardness

Instead of seeing an increase in U.S. security, the end of the Cold

War has seen a decline. It is not hard to imagine that, should the

United States persist in its policies, the international situation will

continue to deteriorate.56

But U.S. willingness to see force as a desirable way to solve many of the

worlds problems even disturbs many fellow Westerners:

Having conned world opinion into a false belief on the scale of Serbian

atrocities, operating without legal sanction and having made a diplo-

matic resolution impossible, Clinton and Blair started the air bom-

bardment on March 24th, 1999. Almost certainly more people were

killed in the bombardment than in the Serbian campaign it was in-tended to deter.57


36/92


We perhaps forget the lesson of the Tao Te Ching,that any use of power,

even (especially) if it is successful, breeds resentment and may plant the seedsof future conflict.

Boyd and Sun Tzu both insisted that to be most effective, the military

option must be integrated within the entire collection of tools available, and

because it involves physical destruction and death, be used sparingly. In the

present circumstances of the United States, these other tools include:

Diplomacy,which Sun Tzu considered second only to attacking an

adversarys strategy as a means of waging war. Boyd placed a high

premium on diplomacy as the operational element of grand strategy,

with the goal of isolating opponents from not only physical support,

such as re-supply, but from the moral and mental (including informa-

tional) interactions necessary to keep their populations united and to

make rational assessments of the situation.58

Economics,which although much maligned, can shut down the in-

ternal processes of all but the most primitive countries. To be effec-

tive, of course, it must be combined with diplomacy as a component

of grand strategy.

Adherence to national ideals.Attracted by democracy and the

free market system, millions of people every year attempt to enter the

United States, some at the risk of their lives. By contrast, relatively

few people are venturing thousands of miles to break into North Ko-

rea, Iraq, or even China in order to participate in the high quality of

life these places offer. Any adversary attempting to mobilize his popu-lation to fight against the United States has to contend with the fact

that a sizable fraction of them would likely prefer to be on the other

side. Some tens of thousands of Chinese students, for example, study

at U.S. colleges and universities and thousands more work for Ameri-

can companies. All of these experience to some degree to our ideals

and freedoms. One of the main themes of Boyds grand strategy is to

increase the numbers of these people as much as possible before hos-

tilities begin. When the shooting starts, the U.S. military would rather

face Iraqi peasant levies that lined up to surrender to reporters than

North Vietnamese or Viet Cong main force units that did not.


37/92


As a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency put it:

Formulating a contemporary strategy that has political, economic,

cultural and functional substance, as well as a liberal amount of pub-

lic understanding and support, must be the goal.59

To summarize, the United States will undoubtedly use military force to

protect what it considers vital national interests of the moment. Ideally, such

force should be used as one component of a careful strategy for realizing these

interests and that when it is used, it should conform to Sun Tzu s three crite-

ria (p. 29) and Boyds grand strategy. However, the national interests approachis only marginally useful for creating forces, since it requires planners to make

fairly specific predictions about what these interests will be, where they will

be threatened, and what type of adversary will be confronted. Because these

predictions must be made decades in advance, they would, in the best case

simply prove irrelevant, and they could telegraph the chosen national strat-

egy to potential opponents.

This raises the question, if not protect vital interests, then what?What

is needed is an approach that will provide effective forces when called for, butwhich does not require accurate predictions of the future. The concepts ad-

vanced by Sun Tzu and John Boyd provide a resolution to this dilemma by

stepping up one level and asking, Regardless of the specifics of how they

will be used, what makes military forces effectivein general?If the United

States creates forces along these lines, and equips and trains them for maneu-

ver conflict and 4GW, then operating in conjunction with allies and using the

other tools for advancing vital interests, it can field an effective and affordable

military force.

Peacekeeping

The United States has historically not considered peacekeepingas a crite-

rion for creating and sizing forces. The same group of forcesabout 10 per-

cent of the Army, for example make multiple deployments to places like

Bosnia and Kosovo, while the rest do not go at all. In other words, the United

States has plenty of forces, it is just not making effective use of what it has.In the initial stages of a peacekeeping operation, military forces may be

needed to engage hostile military forces before true peacekeeping can begin.

This is a standard use of force and presents no conceptual problems, since the


38/92


primary mission of the military is to defeat opposing armed forces by death

and destruction if necessary. This is what they study, equip, and train for.People are promoted (or should be) for their proficiency as war fighters and

leaders of warriors. It is generally considered a full time occupation, and even

reserve forces usually require refresher training, especially at the unit level, to

prepare them to engage in it.

Whether military forces should be engaged in peacekeeping duties after

any hostile military forces have been eliminated is a subject for more serious

debate. In true peacekeeping, the mission is protection, not destruction. It is

more akin to policing than to soldiering, and uses of force must be very care-fully controlled. In fact, one of the largest threats to effective peacekeeping is

the orientation that the underlying problems can be solved by application of

force. This mindset can be reinforced if it seems that armed military groups

cannot be quickly eliminated or, as in Somalia, that they keep reappearing

after a successful initial stage. Such a situation could indicate that the armed

groups enjoy wider support among the population than originally thought

that U.S. forces are engaging in fourth generation warfare without knowing it

and so the venue is not ready for peacekeepingat all.

For all of these reasons, national leaders should study the peacekeeping

problem very carefully. They should consider removing the mission from the

military and placing it somewhere else, in an organization that equips, devel-

ops doctrine, and trains for that mission and not for war. For reasons of grand

strategy, it could be a multinational, permanently organized unitwith U.S.

allies to which the United States contributes resources other than combat

troops. It is not that the American military cannot perform peacekeeping, butthat for their own war-fighting good, they probably should not.


39/92

What Makes a Military Force Effective?

Sun Tzus and Boyds Perspective

Sun Tzu lived and waged war at least 2,500 years ago. What, one might rea-

sonably ask, could one learn from the era of chariots and crossbows that would

prove even the least useful for building effective forces in the age of missiles,

satellites, and information warfare? The first pages of The Art of Warpro-

vide the answer: Sun Tzu was not concerned with the type of hardware in

use. He focused on the problem of how to get groups of people to work to-

gether harmoniously under conditions of hardship, danger, and the inevi-

table confusion of conflict. This question applies just as surely to conflict

today as it did during the Warring States Period, and it applies to all forms of

conflict, including business, politics, and sport.

He begins with the political leadership. Before envisioning conflict with

another state, the ruler and his immediate advisors must survey and compare

five factors:1. Which leadership has the Way? The Way (Tao) means harmony

among people, so that the people and the leadership are united in pur-

pose to overcome fear of danger.

2. Is the terrain favorable?

3. Is the weather likely to be favorable?

4. Which sides generals are the more capable? The political leadership

must make objective comparisons of such factors as humaneness, intel-

ligence, trustworthiness, courage, and sternness.

5. Which armys doctrine and discipline is superior? Here the leadership

must consider organization, control, assignment of appropriate ranks

to officers, regulation of supply routes, and provisions.60


40/92


Only if these comparisons are favorable should the political leadership

proceed to the next level of analysis, which deals more specifically with forceeffectiveness. The key point is that three of the five, and the most significant

three, since weather will change and terrain and weather affect both sides,

concern moral, human, or cultural issues. This is the dominant theme of Sun

Tzu, and will be repeated many times as he discusses military forces. Griffith

sums up The Art of Warin precisely these terms:

Sun Tzu believed that the moral strength and intellectual faculty of

man were decisive in war, and that if these were properly applied,

war could be waged with certain success.61

As an aside, there is nothing in Boyd to contradict this statement.

Sun Tzu then proceeds to enumerate seven factors, related to the five ele-

ments above, to guide planning:

1. Which ruler has the Way? The Way, in this sense, includes unity of

purpose between the ruler and the population and other factors, such as

the ability to clearly perceive the true situation (which includes the ability

to make these comparisons).

2. Which commander is the more able? Consider the factors previously

noted: intelligence, trustworthiness, bravery, humaneness, and sternness.

3. Which army can better exploit the advantages of climate and terrain?

4. Whose troops are the stronger?

5. Whose discipline is more effective? In which army are regulations and

instructions better carried out?

6. Whose officers and soldiers are better trained?7. Whose system of rewards and punishments is clearer?62

In the very next passage, Sun Tzu claims that these seven factors form an

infallible guide to victory.

When a general who heeds my strategy is employed he is certain to

win. Retain him! When one who refuses to listen to my strategy is

employed, he is certain to be defeated. Dismiss him!63

Later in the book, he restates these with a slightly more tactical (i.e., who

will win the next engagement) flavor:


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What Makes a Military Force Effective | 39

1. Those who know when to fight and when not to fight are victorious.

2. Those who know when to use many or few troops are victorious.3. Those whose upper and lower ranks have the same desire are victorious.

4. Those who face the unprepared with preparation are victorious.

5. Those whose generals are able and not constrained by their govern-

ments are victorious.64

Given two alternative military systems, it follows that the more effective

is the one that rates higher on these scales. Sun Tzu does not give any advice

on performing this calculation. As Griffith notes, it was a rational process,

although it relies on a number of subjective judgments, but nothing is known

about how to conduct this defense review.65Do the various elements trade-

off so that, for example, weaknesses in the system of rewards and punish-

ments could be offset by superiority in the training program? One suspects

that this type of sophistry would have little appeal to Sun Tzu. Leaders should

improve weaknesses wherever they exist, and the final calculation rests heavily

on the experience, intelligence, and intuitive understanding of the commander

and the ruler. In fact, success in conflict depends on ones ability to performthese calculations and, in particular, not to deceive oneself.

Again, it should be noted that superiority in hardware is not mentioned at

all. Sun Tzu is rating the effectiveness of the entire force. Sun Tzu and the

commentators do not advise the ruler to spend considerable effort on trying

to develop harder iron or more powerful crossbows or to more rapidly adapt

the new revolutionary technology now known as gunpowder to military

use.66It may be that all the warring states were roughly equal in technology,

and that, because of migration and economic factors, it would have been im-possible for one state to have developed and deployed a novel technology in

sufficient force to have had a decisive effect. Or it may simply have been that

in the hierarchy of force effectiveness, technology rated well behind the seven

factors outlined above.

Boyd on Force Effectiveness

In their writings on strategy, neither Boyd nor Sun Tzu assessed individual

weapons or categories of weapons. This is a critical point, since Boyd spent

the majority of his Air Force career either flying or developing fighter air-

craft. He obviously had strong feelings on the issue. Other than his observa-


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tion about agility in fighters (p. 21), however, and a general remark about

complexity, he gives no advice on selecting hardware. What he does considerare military forces, that is, combinations of people, ideas, and hardware. In

this scheme, peopleincludes all the normal personnel issues of selection,

retention, and promotion, as well as the various moralforces that hold units

together during the stress of combat. Ideasinclude both doctrine and those

concepts that are widely shared but are not written down.

Not that weapons are not important, but his study had shown that time

and again, the smaller or less technologically advanced force could win, whereas

there are relatively few instances where technology or size alone was able toovercome deficiencies in people or ideas. Thus Boyd would insist on People,

ideas, and hardwarein that order!As he examined why this was the case, he

synthesized four factors that he called an organizational scheme for opera-

tional success,and although the elite units of the German army in 1940

provided the initial catalyst, he noted their presence in successful forces from

Sun Tzu down to the modern Israeli Army (at least until 1973).

Boyds scheme is:

Mutual trust; unity.Very similar to The Wayin Sun Tzus list of factors.

Intuitive competence, at all levels from private to general. In addition

to proficiency with weapons at the individual level, intuitive compe-

tencealso applies at the command levels, where it refers to the feel

great commanders have for the progress of the battle, and in particular to

their seemingly uncanny abilities to detect and exploit openings while

they still present opportunities. Comes from years of practice at ever in-

creasing levels of complexity.67The Germans called itfingerspitzengefhl,literally finger tip feelingand it implies such a high level of compe-

tence that decisions can be made without hesitation. Perhaps similar to

the Zen notion of action without a sticking mind.68

Mission orientation.The Germans called this auftragstaktik.69The

basic idea is that commanders and subordinates enter into a type of

contract where the subordinate agrees to fulfill the commanders intent,

while the commander agrees to give the subordinate wide latitude on

how this is done.

Focus and direction.Related to the concept of commanders intent.

It often refers to a specific unit and its mission. All other units must


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Cheng and Chi

Both Boyd and Sun Tzu place great emphasis on the interplay between theexpected and the unexpected, also known as the pinning/distracting and the

decision forces, the orthodox and the unorthodox, or by Sun Tzus original

terminology: chengand chi. This is a tool of strategy available to those who

operate inside their opponentsOODA loops. Again, it applies to the force

(people-ideas-hardware) rather than to any particular component alone.

As for the importance of cheng /chi, Sun Tzu notes that:

Making armies able to take on opponents without being defeated is a

matter of unorthodox (chi)and orthodox (cheng)methods The

unorthodox and the orthodox give rise to each other like a beginning-

less circle who could exhaust them?72

Several points can be inferred about force effectiveness. First, it does not

come from thepredictedeffectiveness of the force, and particularly not from

the predicted effectiveness of individual weapons, or even in combination.

Part of the genius of Sun Tzu and Boyd lay in their abilities to assess a force

without predicting how effective it would be. This seeming contradictionhinges on the idea that the actual performance of the force in the field de-

pends on the enemys actions, which cannot be predicted.73However, by con-

sidering the complete forces on both sides, that is both people-ideas-hard-

ware combinations, one can assess which force is more capable of carrying

out the Boyd/Sun Tzu strategy, thereby leading to certain victory.

All predictions of effectiveness must assume some pattern of enemy activ-

ity, even if it is just stand there and be shot(or servicedin todays termi-

nology). By definition, then, the enemy is behaving as predicted and so all

modelingis clearly cheng. True war-winning effectiveness comes from the

forces ability to play the cheng / chi game, that is, to set up the opponent,

then quickly shift to something he does not anticipate, and then to exploit to

the fullest the resulting confusion.

So the rule of military operations is not to count on opponents not com-

ing, but to rely on having ways to deal with them; not to count on oppo-

nents not attacking, but to rely on having what cannot be attacked.74

A key element of both Sun Tzus and Boyds strategy was to drive the

opponent crazybefore actually committing military forces. Isolation in all


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What Makes a Military Force Effective | 43

formsparticularly diplomatic and economicis an effective tool for accom-

plishing this. As Boyd concluded in Strategic Game of ? and ?on a slideentitled The Art of Success:

Morally-mentally-physically isolate our adversaries from their allies

and outside support as well as isolate them from one another in order

to magnify their internal friction, produce paralysis, bring about their

collapse and/or bring about a change in their political / economic /

social philosophy so that they can no longer inhibit our vitality and

growth.75

As noted previously, the goal of morally-mentally-physically isolat[ing]

our adversaries from their allies and outside supportis one of the primary

objectives of grand strategy. For the purpose of protecting vital national in-

terests, effective military forces would harmonize with those of allies, help

enforce diplomatic and economic efforts to isolate adversaries, and end any

recourse to armed conflict in accordance with the criteria of Sun Tzu, which

are worth repeating:

In the shortest possible time.

At the least possible cost in lives and effort to ones own side.

With the infliction on the enemy of the fewest possible casualties.76

In keeping with Boyds concept of grand strategy, this would not only at-

tract the uncommitted to ones own side, but also make it easy for the con-

queredpopulation to resume normal diplomatic and trade relationships af-

ter the conflict has ended.

To summarize, in Boyds view of conflict, an effective force would typify

the four elements of his organizational scheme, and so be able to operate with

quick, inconspicuous, and irregular OODA loops. Such a force would be

employed as a component of an overall national strategy in ways that rein-

force alliances and that end the conflict without sowing the seeds of the next

one. Since the specific tactics to be used depend on the actions of the enemy,

they cannot be specified in advance. However one can note that drawn out

campaigns tend to strain both alliances and U.S. domestic support, and whatis seen as gratuitous destruction alienates support in the United States, among

allied countries, and within those groups in the target society that would sup-

port the U.S. cause.


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Other Concepts of Effectiveness

As noted, Boyd and Sun Tzu describe how an effective force should operate,using concepts like the seven factors, cheng / chi,and the ability to operate

with quick/inconspicuous/irregular OODA loops. There are other ways of

assessing force effectiveness, of course. Perhaps the simplest is spending level

that if a country spends more on defense, it must be buying more defense,

that is, that it has more effective forces. Although stated in this manner, such

a position seems simplistic, the idea lives on in the recent wave of suggestions

that the defense budget be pegged at an arbitrary percentage of gross domes-

tic product (generally to 3.5 percent or 4 percent). The idea apparently is thatstrength is a direct function of spending. This is not necessarily as simplistic

as it first appears; it does not mean that these people agree with Caspar

Weinberger, that if youre spending more, you must be getting more. It does

suggest, however, that they do believe that current U.S. defense problems can

be alleviated by spending more and only by spending more. Fence off the

money, then argue over what to spend it on.

There is a related concept, however, that states that if U.S. leaders are

dissatisfied with current defense posture, any reasonable solution will involve

increased spending. This position has a number of sophisticated observers

behind it, including at least two well-respected secretaries of defense.77These

commentators often point to what they call a decade of neglect,when the

U.S. military bought few new systems to replace those left over from the Cold

War. As a result, the

A Swift Elusive Sword

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